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> The Peter Principle seems most applicable to business management,
> especially at the director and higher level. The flaw with trying to
> apply it to lower ranking staff is its assumption that once someone
> rises to the level of his or her incompetence he or she will be left
> there and never fired, and while there certainly must be some
companies
> that are reluctant to fire people at lower staff levels, I've not
> encountered one myself.

Firing people for incompetence is difficult, if not impossible, at any
number of organizations -- mostly they're unionized, bureaucracies, and
especially unionized bureacracies. A particularly striking example is
the New York City public school system. It spends $20 million a year
paying incompetent and dangerous teachers to do nothing because firing
them is too expensive and time-consuming.

And be sure to check out the illustrated step-by-step guide to firing a
teacher (PDF) that's linked at the end. It's an interesting example of
how to document a complex procedure -- and there's your tech writing
tie-in. ;-)